Though best-known as a historian, W.H. (Bill) Oliver was also a well-known poet, particularly during the 1940s and 1950s. The photograph shows him at a poetry reading with other poets at Canterbury Museum in 1956; left to right: Denis Glover, Oliver, James K. Baxter, Louis Johnson, William Hart-Smith, Anton Vogt, and Keith Sinclair.
The 2012 recording features Oliver reading five poems from various phases of his career:
To My Mother
Till the last six months she kept
on the shelf above her bed
a tiny lighthouse carved
from a slab of Cornish granite.
Formally composed
the Longships and the Wolf
hung on the sitting room wall
keeping the harsh Atlantic
domestic and subdued.
In a photograph my uncle
posed with a penny farthing
by the stone mill where the Hoskings
for generations ground corn
in high fly-to-Jesus collars
and stiff respectable serge.
She in her severe
cloche hat well pulled down
kept a clear and level eye
steady in the merciless
blaze of the southern sun.
Into it I frown,
hair slicked flat as glass
mouth down at the corners
white shirt itching shorts
socks around the ankles.
Recorded on the back
in her careful hand
‘Bill last day at school
1937
12 ½ years.’
(W.H. Oliver. Poems 1946–2005. Wellington, 2005, p.134)
Bill Oliver: This poem is called ‘Blue Irises’. It celebrates Lauris Edmond and remembers a visit I paid not to her funeral, but to her grave a day or so after her funeral, and left a bunch of blue irises on her still unfinished grave.
Blue Irises
After, appropriately,
several false turnings
and twice overshooting the mark
I was there, on the shorn grass
looking around at the hills
uncertain, suitably too
which of the freshly turned
patches of dirt embraced
the bodily trace you had left
cold and hard on your bed
in the red-curtained room
in the house over the harbour
and found a pile of new clay
which might have been it and would do
well enough and against it
set down the blue irises
and thought I would have the last word
for certain this once and it was
the only one spoken for you
were not here and not
as far as evidence goes
anywhere else I could think of
and look back once or twice
at the blue fleck against the drab
immensity of clay.
(W.H. Oliver. Poems 1946–2005. Wellington, 2005, p.141)
Mahina Bay
The spent waves sleep, and in their sleeping turn
Against the rocks, they murmur in the night, their cry
Rises to the forest edge, to learn
The music of leaves there, where sea-winds sigh
Between branches. And to-night there is peace
Rising from the long tormented sea; distant and tranquil
Lights glitter from the further shore; heavy black trees
Merge with the ocean, and the mountain ridges fall
Uninterruptedly to the shore-line, down
To the floor of the harbour, to the earth’s slow heart.
And as I watch, my dreaming mind is shown
This marriage mystery, and may not move apart
From land and ocean. As I’m standing here
The margins of the two worlds disappear.
(W.H. Oliver. Poems 1946–2005. Wellington, 2005, p.49)
Fire Without Phoenix
This red scabbard of rock
In hot December holds
Only a thread of water
Twisted along its folds.
The bitter summer leaves
No land unmarked, it locks
All life deep underground
Beneath the weight of rocks.
Echoes of torment travel
From hanging face to face
Over the parching gorges;
Seasons will displace
This death with chaos, though
In summer could arise
That flame-born phoenix, bright
And angered, soul’s harsh prize.
(W.H. Oliver. Poems 1946–2005. Wellington, 2005, p.19)
Oliver: This poem is called ‘To Go With a Memoir’, and that means it is to accompany, and in some way to sign off, my brief autobiography, Looking for the phoenix.
To Go With a Memoir
This little spurt of words
is to go along with a life
soon to be done but not
till all the delaying tactics
no longer do the trick
and no digression provides
an invitation to linger
and no parenthesis
proposes itself as at least
a possible postponement
and the anecdotes no longer
go on almost forever
and the paragraphs become
too long for anyone’s patience
and words no longer suffice
to qualify the silence,
and I will no longer bring
this old self dressed to kill
for, it may be, your pleasure
and in order as well to avoid
for today and perhaps tomorrow
the need to turn a blank page.
(W.H. Oliver. Poems 1946–2005. Wellington, 2005, p.146)
Tāngia te kōrero katoa
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
Manatū Taonga – Ministry for Culture and Heritage
Reference:
W.H. Oliver oral history with Alison Parr, 2012
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Photograph: Alexander Turnbull Library, Bridget Williams Collection, PAColl-2146-009
Text: Estate of W.H. Oliver
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